The Rich And The Profane (21 page)

‘Antiques,’ I told them, sitting on this stool in Dove’s french window space, them around me like Sunday school children, ‘are among the biggest illegitimate sources of gelt in the world. Some say that we - I mean,’ I added hastily,
‘they,
the forgers and thieves in the trade - come second, after arms dealers, drugs and banking frauds.’

‘Lovejoy.’ Joe was worried ‘Why’re you telling us this?’ ‘Background, Joe.’ I smiled my sincere smile at Meg. Dove watched intently from her pillow. ‘I want us all to understand where we’re at.’ It sounded wrong, because I can’t talk that modern slangy stuff. ‘Where we’re coming from,’ I tried doubtfully, and gave up. ‘Understand,’ I said firmly, my own lingo. ‘You can’t know what’s fair unless I tell you what’s unfair, right?’

‘But—’

‘Daddy!’ Dove scolded impatiently. Like a good father Joe shut it.

‘There are three levels of antiques, and of dealers who find them. Sometimes,’ I added, unsmiling, ‘dealers include real people, but not often. Think of an ocean. The bottom level of antiques is plankton. That means cheapest. Second come the plankton feeders - the dealers who find antiques in junk sales, fairgrounds, vicarages, house clearances, anywhere Out There. These plankton feeders can even be giant whales - TV scouts on a countryside sweep happening across some valuable painting in their telly
Antique Road Shows.
Or the plankton feeder can be stickleback size, meaning a casual collector or low-grade dealer who just blunders onto some valuable ornament. Fakes and forgeries are rife at plankton level,’ I added, looking at Meg. ‘And plankton feeders aren’t all honest. They’ll sell you a fake Sheraton chair as genuine, if they can.’ Meg had the grace to blush. ‘Or,’ I added, ‘an armillary sphere.’

‘Is that us?’ Dove asked with delight.

I eyed her. Some folk can be too quick for their own good. ‘You’re no giants, Dove, but yes, I mean you.’ ‘Which is our ornament?’ she asked, smiling.

‘You’ll have us here all frigging day,’ I complained, but went and brought the stone carving. It was some nine inches high, a small mountain-shaped reddish sculpture of nine intertwined dragons. The top one had a small ball in its mouth. They were coiled about a large Chinese coin carved in the centre. The stone had been hollowed out, but must have weighed nearly three pounds. ‘This.’

‘You’re wrong, Lovejoy,’ Joe said. I looked at him, seeing where his bolshie daughter got it from. ‘I did its density. It’s not jade.’

‘I know. It’s Shou-Shan rock. It’s not as tough as jadeite jade, but carves easier. It’s more opaque. But it’s an important carving none the less. Hong Kong includes Kowloon. It means “nine dragons”. Count them on your carving.’

Shou-Shan is a small town in Fukien, less than forty miles from Foochow. It’s famous for this stuff.

‘The yellowish stone’s most sought after, for carving Chinese seals - those “name chops” everybody buys on holiday. Your name in Chinese characters, y’know?’

‘Is it valuable?’ Meg breathed, keen to get back brownie points.

‘Not very, but not cheap, love.’ And, as she brightened, ‘It’ll look pretty, washed clean, mounted on mahogany against scarlet velvet. Nowadays it’s a historic document. It might buy you a good used car.’

‘See?’ Meg squealed and clapped her hands. Gussy looked on, waiting. She wanted news of my scam that would sell her paintings. I smiled to encourage the little bit of jubilation, because artists can be a right frigging pest.

‘I’ll write it out. There’s another place, Chin-tien in Chekiang, which markets stone used to imitate jadeite jade. It’s quite easy to fake this stuff, using Suffolk flint ground small in Polyfilla powder, but I can’t stand those acrylic paints you have to use ...’ I realized what I was saying, and went red. ‘Er, I’ve
heard
that’s what forgers do.’

‘I think I’ve seen another carving like that, but smaller,’ Joe said.

‘Keep it up, Joe. They’re all over. People sell them cheap
because
they’re not jade. Ever heard anything so daft? So many people were out East in the days of the Raj. And keep an eye out for medals, anything from brasswork to ivory buttons. Never a boot sale but what there’s four or five suchlike on the stalls.’

‘Oh, weren’t we lucky!’ Meg marvelled, while Gussy looked askance. She was impatient for the world to focus on her.

‘It happens, love.’ I wanted to get it across that finds are not as rare as all that. ‘Finds can be apocalyptic. Every week there are stunning windfalls. Somebody lately found the city of Urkesh, 4,500 years old, underneath a town in Syria, where the ancient Hurrian civilization flowered. The very next day, Alfred Gilbert’s statue of Perseus popped up in some tiny flat belonging to a defunct headmaster in Bristol.’ I described the exquisite cast in high bronze, almost weeping in jealous rage. The lucky swine had discovered the original commissioned version, inscribed
Fonderia Nelli, Roma,
the Italian centre of Victorian lost-wax bronze casting. That mark on a bronze sculpture is the giveaway, the gateway to the highest prices, so keep an eye out.

‘It’s not fair,’ I went on miserably. ‘See, we deserve some massive find like that. Think of what we could ... er.’ I collected myself, noticing that they were all staring at me. ‘Sorry,’ I ended lamely. ‘I get carried away.’

‘What’re the last, Lovejoy?’ Dove asked. ‘You said three levels of antiques and dealers. Plankton, then plankton feeders, then ... ?’

‘Sharks, love.’

There was a momentary silence.

‘Which will we be?’ she asked, really enjoying herself.

‘Plankton.’ I smiled, innocent. ‘Though we might feed a little.’

‘Antiques sharks, Lovejoy?’ Dove pressed. ‘Here in Guernsey?’

‘Good heavens!’ I cried, laughing. ‘Who’d even think such a thing? Sharks are voracious, use any savagery to snaffle antiques!’

That’s antiques for you in a nutshell. Plankton, the plankton feeder and the shark. I hid the ultimate question: which of the three is the next antique hunter you’ll meet? You never know the answer to that.

On which high note we ended. I listed the best of Meg’s stock - hardly worth more than she’d paid - and borrowed a few quid. We all shook hands on the deal, which I’d carefully omitted to define. I promised to come next day with the whole plan.

Walt and Gussy drove me back. They put me down on a small cliff near the harbour, from where I could watch the boats.

My only remaining obstacle was to legitimize my presence on Guernsey. I watched two small yachts - cutters, were they? - luffing, or whatever it’s called, rounding the headland. I looked at every promontory anew, now I’d heard Gussy’s childhood tale. I had to think of a legit way to
be
here. I was already disguised as the showbiz bloke called Jonno, the one who’d sicked the Plod on to me. I wanted to be here as me, Lovejoy the innocent, Lovejoy who could be forgiven for masquerading as somebody else.

Forgiven by whom? By those in power, who might arrest me for impersonation. It was small beer, really. Antique dealers are always at it, pretending this daub is by Leonardo da Vinci, that manky hatchet work is by Michelangelo, this pathetic scribble’s in Shakespeare’s hand, and so on. I didn’t care if I was here as Jonno Rant or King Kong, as long as I got nearer whatever treasures Prior Metivier was hoarding. I swear it was only that. For all I knew, Gesso was fine and I was jumping to conclusions.

How had I come in the first place? A distant ferry hove into view, steaming cross the horizon.

It had all started with Irma Dominick’s desire to steal a worthless necklace from Gimbert’s Auction. She gets herself arrested for stealing, not her necklace, but some Rockingham jug. I get Michaelis Singleton, wino lawyer, to spring her. The porcelain anyway belonged to Mrs Jocina Crucifex, her aunt, famed Rockingham collector. I’m meanwhile faking, with brilliance, a rare bookcase for Prince, blue-blooded spendthrift with hardly a neurone between his ears but who has money plus a shrewd sense of deception. Then - I’d lost track - I finish up pretending to be Jonno Rant, after encountering Metivier and his lovely but hate-filled sister Marie at the boot sale, who admit to having antiques they want me to divvy. ‘Farther than you’ll ever know, Lovejoy,’ Marie’d said at our first meeting, and ‘More than you’ll ever see.’ So Prior George had a cache of antiques. And where else but here in Guernsey?

Estranged from gorgeous Florida because I wasn’t a gambler, I gain approval from Marie Metivier for the same reason. (Don’t ask me to explain
that
paradox.) Gesso, part-time worker at Metivier’s financially strapped Albansham Priory, proves me a divvy by that trick in the cloister. Good old Jocina Crucifex has me join her fundraising team to support the priory. The Plod’s in there too - Summer, no less. I suspect that he’s barmy over Jocina - well, weren’t we all, including none other than Prior George himself?

Martin Crucifex is fiercely loyal to Guernsey, loveliest island in the world.

The dark secret is that Prior Metivier is a notorious gambler. Like all gamblers, he loses. At horse racing, at field sports, at whippet racing, even at the illegal bare-fist fights, as Charley the champion told me. Me and Gesso burgle the priory. Gesso gets caught, and vanishes.

Here I had to blot my eyes, clear my throat from the terrible frog growing in there as I remembered that gruesome scrape on that flint cobble near the priory’s hot pool. I’d found it the day I discovered that the prior’s holy order had finally taken to the hills - some religious retreat, spurious or otherwise. Out on the sea the yachts were turning round a buoy marker. A longer thicker boat was coming round the headland, pale cream sails, Red Ensign.

Summoned to Florida’s point-to-point, I get chased by Jonno Rant’s bodyguards and the police. Into the woods. I find out from Logger Yelk that the priory’s closed for ever, submerged in gambling debts, all its money-making schemes done for. Marie’s ‘slice of luck’ - the O’Conor painting I’d nicked, that they’d stolen back, and sold to that posh London firm - pays off Prior Metivier’s gambling debts, the naughty man.

Symie Doakes at the Hippodrome tells me it’s no mere chance. It’s a painting that had come to the priory’s rescue. I nick Barnie Woodfall’s list of auditioning performers and hoof it. I also mck a small antique from Paula to sell to Harry Bateman, and set sail for the Channel Isles.

And here I am at Mrs Rosa Vidamour’s in beautiful Guernsey. Prior Metivier is in the phone book at Metivier Mansion. I find Gussy, an eccentric painter ceaselessly copying some stupendous painting she once glimpsed as a child in a local cave. Walt Jethou, the Carrieres - low-grade antique dealers - with Dove the paralysed artist daughter, become my allies, sort of. I phone Florida, hint that I’m into some gambling scheme. She’s as daft over betting as Prior George, but doesn’t lose quite as catastrophically. With luck, she’ll be on her way.

So now I needed to legitimize my presence here on this marvellous isle. If they’d topped Gesso they could easily do for me here on their home ground, especially as I didn’t know who ‘they’ were.

Who’d complete my foolproof plan? Women.

After all, it’s a woman’s world.

Once, as a teenager, I tried to work women out. What does a woman invariably forgive in a man? Looking out at the ships, my bafflement returned. Lust, say? Does a woman
always
forgive a man who lusts for her? No. Films, newspapers, are full of evidence against.

Well, desire, then? It’s perilously close to lust. No also, same evidence, same reasons.

Love? Could love be that special thing that women always find forgiveness for? Women’s magazines are crammed with what passes for love. Literature preaches that love wins out, when we all know deep down that it doesn’t. Love conquers all, they say, but it can’t so it doesn’t. My frank opinion? Never in a million years do women forgive love just because it’s aimed their way. I had a great-great aunt whose headstone reads, with terrible ambiguity,
ON
THE TENTH OF THE FIRST MONTH OF THE YEAR OF GRACE, ALMIGHTY GOD DID PLEASE US ALL BY TAKING UNTO HIMSELF 
my beloved wife
... The family’s party line is that her husband loved her even though she treated him like dirt all their married days - this back when you didn’t divorce.

See? Love abounded somewhere, but to what end? God’s probably still puzzling her out up there on some cloud.

Aye, love is a dangerous word. Years ago there was a famous musical in which some geezer sang the question ‘Do you love me?’ His wife sings in answer that she washed the dishes, cooks his grub, does his clothes, raises his kids. He rejoices - she loves him! OK, she might have, but he was taking an unimaginable risk. Love isn’t a long-service medal. I once was in hospital because a woman had stabbed me. In the next bed was this old chap. Convalescing, I used to sit and chat, though he was quite off his trolley. He plucked my sleeve one evening in fright. ‘Son,’ he babbled in delirium. ‘Promise me you’ll not let your ma take care of me if ever I’m ill.’ I promised, hand on my heart. He’d been married, the nurses said, over forty years, but nobody ever visited him. He was sent to some nursing home. No, love definitely is not mere longevity.

Two years ago I made love to this older woman who had a genuine Tudor apostle spoon, London stamped. Don’t laugh - it would buy your house. It was honestly Henry VIII vintage, with the maker’s fringed S mark. It even had its own little history, bless its beautiful little soul. Fakes of these are legion, but beware missing an honest antique as costly as this one was. (Sorry, digressing.) She’d dressed afterwards as I watched. She prattled, ‘No dozing today, darling. Mark’s taking me to a dinner dance tonight. I haven’t got long. My Mark’s a wonderful dancer.’ I said, penny dropping, ‘You’ve no intention of selling me that apostle spoon?’ She trilled a merry laugh, gay as a sprite. ‘Of
course
I haven’t, Lovejoy!’ I demanded, ‘Then why this?’, meaning why make love. She’d sobered, sat on the bed. ‘For two reasons, darling,’ she cooed. ‘One, because I like crude!’ I’d asked what two was. ‘How dim you are, Lovejoy!’ she said, rolling on her stockings. ‘The reason is, I hate him.’ She was fifty-three. They’d been married twenty-one years, two children at university. No, longevity isn’t love. It’s not vice versa either.